Posts Tagged ‘competition’

break up Facebook

https://nyti.ms/2LzRzwq

Facebook’s board works more like an advisory committee than an overseer, because Mark controls around 60 percent of voting shares. Mark alone can decide how to configure Facebook’s algorithms to determine what people see in their News Feeds, what privacy settings they can use and even which messages get delivered. He sets the rules for how to distinguish violent and incendiary speech from the merely offensive, and he can choose to shut down a competitor by acquiring, blocking or copying it.

We are a nation with a tradition of reining in monopolies, no matter how well intentioned the leaders of these companies may be. Mark’s power is unprecedented and un-American.

It is time to break up Facebook.

America was built on the idea that power should not be concentrated in any one person, because we are all fallible. That’s why the founders created a system of checks and balances.

More legislation followed in the 20th century, creating legal and regulatory structures to promote competition and hold the biggest companies accountable.

Starting in the 1970s, a small but dedicated group of economists, lawyers and policymakers sowed the seeds of our cynicism. Over the next 40 years, they financed a network of think tanks, journals, social clubs, academic centers and media outlets to teach an emerging generation that private interests should take precedence over public ones. Their gospel was simple: “Free” markets are dynamic and productive, while government is bureaucratic and ineffective.

American industries, from airlines to pharmaceuticals, have experienced increased concentration, and the average size of public companies has tripled. The results are a decline in entrepreneurshipstalled productivity growth, and higher prices and fewer choices for consumers.

From our earliest days, Mark used the word “domination” to describe our ambitions, with no hint of irony or humility.

Facebook’s monopoly is also visible in its usage statistics. About 70 percent of American adults use social media, and a vast majority are on Facebook products. Over two-thirds use the core site, a third use Instagram, and a fifth use WhatsApp. By contrast, fewer than a third report using Pinterest, LinkedIn or Snapchat. What started out as lighthearted entertainment has become the primary way that people of all ages communicate online.

The F.T.C.’s biggest mistake was to allow Facebook to acquire Instagram and WhatsApp. In 2012, the newer platforms were nipping at Facebook’s heels because they had been built for the smartphone, where Facebook was still struggling to gain traction. Mark responded by buying them, and the F.T.C. approved.

The News Feed algorithm reportedly prioritized videos created through Facebook over videos from competitors, like YouTube and Vimeo. In 2012, Twitter introduced a video network called Vine that featured six-second videos. That same day, Facebook blocked Vine from hosting a tool that let its users search for their Facebook friends while on the new network. The decision hobbled Vine, which shut down four years later.

unlike Vine, Snapchat wasn’t interfacing with the Facebook ecosystem; there was no obvious way to handicap the company or shut it out. So Facebook simply copied it. (opyright law does not extend to the abstract concept itself.)

As markets become more concentrated, the number of new start-up businesses declines. This holds true in other high-tech areas dominated by single companies, like search (controlled by Google) and e-commerce (taken over by Amazon). Meanwhile, there has been plenty of innovation in areas where there is no monopolistic domination, such as in workplace productivity (Slack, Trello, Asana), urban transportation (Lyft, Uber, Lime, Bird) and cryptocurrency exchanges (Ripple, Coinbase, Circle).

The choice is mine, but it doesn’t feel like a choice. Facebook seeps into every corner of our lives to capture as much of our attention and data as possible and, without any alternative, we make the trade.

Just last month, Facebook seemingly tried to bury news that it had stored tens of millions of user passwords in plain text format, which thousands of Facebook employees could see. Competition alone wouldn’t necessarily spur privacy protection — regulation is required to ensure accountability — but Facebook’s lock on the market guarantees that users can’t protest by moving to alternative platforms.

Mark used to insist that Facebook was just a “social utility,” a neutral platform for people to communicate what they wished. Now he recognizes that Facebook is both a platform and a publisher and that it is inevitably making decisions about values. The company’s own lawyers have argued in court that Facebook is a publisher and thus entitled to First Amendment protection.

As if Facebook’s opaque algorithms weren’t enough, last year we learned that Facebook executives had permanently deleted their own messages from the platform, erasing them from the inboxes of recipients; the justification was corporate security concerns.

Mark may never have a boss, but he needs to have some check on his power. The American government needs to do two things: break up Facebook’s monopoly and regulate the company to make it more accountable to the American people.

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We Don’t Need Social Media

The push to regulate or break up Facebook ignores the fact that its services do more harm than good

Colin Horgan, May 13, 2019

https://onezero.medium.com/we-dont-need-social-media-53d5455f4f6b

Hughes joins a growing chorus of former Silicon Valley unicorn riders who’ve recently had second thoughts about the utility or benefit of the surveillance-attention economy their products and platforms have helped create. He is also not the first to suggest that government might need to step in to clean up the mess they made

Nick Srnicek, author of the book Platform Capitalism and a lecturer in digital economy at King’s College London, wrotelast month, “[I]t’s competition — not size — that demands more data, more attention, more engagement and more profits at all costs

 

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more on Facebook in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=facebook

alternative leaderboards

Gamification: Alternative Leaderboards

https://elearningindustry.com/gamification-alternative-leaderboards
Wanting to win’ versus “wanting to avoid losing” is a subtle yet crucial distinction; Murayama and Elliot’s (2012) set of meta-analyses found the effects of competition depend on this distinction in the minds of players. When someone wants to perform better than others, they tend to benefit from competition. But when they want to avoid performing worse than others, competing tends to reduce their performance.
Senko et al’s (2017) meta-analysis found that “wanting to win” improves the performance of participants only when it’s accompanied by strategies that support feelings of mastery. So “wanting to win” alone is not enough to inoculate players from the downsides of competitive social environments.

There are 2 principles of design to support the outcome:

  1. Workplace performance is more complex than a single number on a leaderboard.
    Let’s show the major competencies that drive the performance, instead of one single number.
  2. Don’t just compare yourself to others. Compare your performance against your own history!
    Let’s show the trajectory for driving competencies!

Imagine a leaderboard more like a performance dashboard where your overall performance is broken down your top competencies with your historical data points. You can see the trajectory of where you’re heading. Then, you can show the company average and top performers’ numbers on each competency. You can identify your strength and opportunities. Then, you can apply AI to give you guidance on how to change your trajectory based on top performers’ data points.

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More on leaderboards in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=leaderboards

more on gamification in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=gamification

GradeCraft

University of Michigan Commercializes Gameful Learning Tool

By Rhea Kelly 06/20/17

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2017/06/20/university-of-michigan-commercializes-gameful-learning-tool.aspx

GradeCraft, the software uses gaming elements such as competition, badges and unlocks to help students progress through their courses.

GradeCraft was co-developed in 2012 by Barry Fishman, professor at the University of Michigan’s Schools of Information and Education, and Caitlin Holman, doctoral candidate in the School of Information and lead software developer at Office of Academic Innovation‘s Digital Innovation Greenhouse. The project was recognized with a Campus Technology Innovators award in 2016.

The University of Arizona has become one of the first universities to purchase a site license for GradeCraft.

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more on gamification in education in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=gamification

latest in social media

In continuation of my last week IMS blog post
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2017/01/21/latest-in-social-media/

Facebook Stories puts a Snapchat clone above the News Feed